User:CalderPatterson/sandbox

Article Evaluation

This Sandbox page is a review of the Wikipedia article for rare-earth elements.

Overall, a very good article. There is lots of discussion on the Talk page, dominated by a user name Polyamorph. There are lots of citations, most of which are from good, neutral sources and there is nowhere in the article that has been flagged as lacking supporting citations, although the origins section is a bit flimsy and lacks citations except for links to other wiki articles. All citations that I checked had working links. Some citations are to very old, likely canonical publications (oldest being 1923), some of these should probably be updated and replaced, particularly since the original publications might be difficult to find.

Some citations are to news articles, which should be taken with a grain of salt, but for the most part these are present as an indicator of interest/importance, the Talk page doesn't seem to have a problem with them.

The content on the page is uniformly relevant to the topic of rare-earth elements, although some of the material would be better suited, in my opinion, to the related rare-earth minerals page, particularly the history of Discovery and Early History section, since these were discoveries of minerals not of the isolated elements, which is discussed in the section.

As mentioned in the Talk page, there is little discussion regarding the many uses of these elements both in industries and science, so that might be important to add.

There is also little mention of the deposit types that are associated with rare earth elements, but more information can be found by following links to the rare-earth minerals page and then following links from there.

There was some discussion on the Talk page about neutrality and it was pointed out that there is a prevalent US-perspective. The good news is that editors are aware of this and are minimizing this influence as best they can (as far as I can tell). There is also a focus on China and it's rare earth element production, which is reasonable considering its significance to the resource, but there is definitely a disproportionate focus, it would be good to see a more robust section that discusses global production and shows contributions from many countries and regions that comes before the China section, not just a follow up section called "Outside China". There is also a focus on economic and environmental implications of rare earth elements, but not a lot of discussion regarding the related geology.

There is a lot of discussion on the Talk page for this article, but as a geologist, the most interesting to me is the discussion of the naming of rare earth element groups. As is pointed out, heavy (HREE) and light (LREE) rare earth elements are the most common grouping in Earth Sciences so it doesn't make sense that these aren't explained or used in this article at all. There is also only light discussion of the partitioning of these different element groups in melts, both in this article and the peripheral mineral/deposit articles.

The article is rated as a B-class article and is part of three wiki projects of Mid- to High-Importance.

This article is for the most part well-balanced but is different from discussions in class in that it doesn't discuss much of the actual geology/geochemistry revolving around the deposits that the REEs are extracted from.

Might be interesting to improve on the respective peripheral deposit pages and improve on minor discussions and links to those in this article to make it more robust and add some more geological perspective to the article.