Talk:Official bilingualism in the public service of Canada

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 September 2020 and 18 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): CallMeEz7.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Charts

For detailed data used for the charts see each individual file's discussion page. Spicy Mayan Chocolate (talk) 19:50, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Insufficient Lead Section

According to page 5 of the Evaluating Wikipedia Brochure, "a lead section must give an easy-to-understand overview [...] and [must] summarize the article's key points." This is usually accomplished through one (or up to a few more) paragraph(s) of prose summarizing the key points expanded upon in the article. However, the first part of the Lead Section in this article is overly terse and jumps jarringly right into a bulleted list, which does the job of the summary instead of prose. This makes the article feel unfinished, as if it were a preliminary rough draft, rather than an encyclopaedia article. I would suggest expanding and synthesizing the bulleted list into one paragraph of continuous prose. Dbell92 (talk) 08:51, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Organizing Content and Adding Citations

Great start on this article! It's good to see that a lot of sections contain footnotes to quality references, and I'm glad that you took the time to lay out the entire history of the issue of bilingualism in the public service.

There are some things you may want to think about modifying to make this article even more clear (and things that will help you conform to the Evaluating Wikipedia brochure, which is what I'm using to make these suggestions). I notice that in the lead section you reference some issues pertaining to this topic that have piqued public interest, but I don't see these clearly being expanded upon in the article. Rather than putting them as motivators in the lead section, consider moving these topics to their own section (perhaps "Concerns") and expanding on them there. This will allow you to clean up the lead section and simply provide a definition of bilingualism and a brief overview of why it is important in Canada's public service.

The history section is good, but it could probably also be further broken down into sections based on time period or major events, to keep the information well-structured. One issue I have with this section is that there are some claims that are missing citations. For example, a statement like this should be cited: "For the greater part of Canada’s history, French-speakers were underrepresented, and English-speakers were overrepresented in the ranks of the public service." It is likely the case that the information motivating this statement is cited further down in the article, but I think it would be clearer to also add the citation to the statement itself.

Finally, I notice multiple uses of "seems to have", "seemingly", and "seem to". I would caution you against using this sort of language, since it comes across as a statement of opinion rather than fact. Rather, I would advise you to back up your statements with reasons, data, and citations.

All in all, as I said before, great start on this article, and with some modifications I'm excited to see where you'll take it!

Vloewen (talk) 16:30, 18 September 2014 (UTC)