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Article Evaluations: Joseph Priestley My first impression of the article was that it was structured as a systematic biography. Rather than focusing solely on Priestley's contributions to science or his controversial religious/political views, the Wikipedia page steadily discussed Priestley's life in 5-10 year snippets. In effect, the page fulfills the Wikipedia requirement of being comprehensive, neutral, and fact-oriented, providing an overview of Priestley's life without analyzing or overly discussing specific events or developments. Overall, everything in the article is relevant to Priestley, his life, and his work. While the topics certainly aren't necessarily related to each other, they do not have to be--Wikipedia focuses on quickly summarizing the topic at hand, and all the sections do relate to Joseph Priestley. I do notice that while comprehensive, the article does seem to emphasize Priestley's scientific contributions over his religious beliefs, just by comparing the sheer amount of text devoted to each subject. However, this is not necessarily Wikipedia's fault. As Priestley is most famous for being a scientist, most secondary sources on him will discuss his science, and as Wikipedia is primarily based on secondary sources, this subtle bias may simply be a cause of what secondary sources on Priestley focus on. The article is a featured article (golden star), indicating that it is one of the best articles on Wikipedia for its accuracy, neutrality, and comprehensiveness. I did get a sense of these qualities when reading the article. First of all, I noticed that this Wikipedia article was more accurate when discussing Priestley's contributions to the discovery of oxygen than more "credible" sources such as the American Chemical Society. Indeed, Wikipedia states that while Priestley is usually credited as the discoverer of oxygen, "Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier also have a claim to the discovery," whereas the ACS barely mentions Scheele and Lavoisier at all. This article seems to give an unbiased view of history, focusing on what actually happened over what society typically thinks happened. I also was amazed at the consistent work put in to keep the article up to date and polished. Looking at the revision history, I noticed that the article had been updated 30 times in 2017 alone.

Royal Society In contrast the Joseph Priestley article, this article is only tagged with a "good article" symbol (green plus sign). When reading it, I could tell why. The article featured significantly less citations per paragraph/line than the article on Joseph Priestley. This was especially noticeable in the section "19th Century to the present." Moreover, there was also some missing information. When discussing the current membership of the Royal Society, the article states that "it is currently 52," but does not indicate when that measurement was taken (a tag "when?" even appears over that statement). Also, the article seems to be less comprehensive and more biased than the Priestley article. For example, in the "Fellows" section, the main text is very general, but accompanying the text are two images--one of Newton, the other of Stephen Hawking. These two men are hardly representative of the entire Royal Society, and makes it seem as though only the most prestigious scientists are fellows of the Society. Both of these men are also physicists (primarily), giving an unrealistic image of the Society. Looking at the revision history, I noticed that the article has not been as recently edited as the Priestley article (March 17 instead of April 8). Moreover, the last time it was edited, two editors were arguing over their respective edits, signifying that the article's information may not be entirely accurate, and that despite Wikipedia's attempt to only contain unbiased information, personal interpretations of history do in fact influence what is (or is not) included. I also noticed that the article was a little disjointed, and kept referencing other articles (Fellow of the Royal Society, List of Fellows of the Royal Society, etc) to fill in the gaps. With such inconsistencies, the article by itself is not completely comprehensive, and for a user attempting to navigate the information, all the redirection to other pages may become tedious and inconvenient. --Keiradams (talk) 03:11, 9 April 2017 (UTC)