User:Ajs2004/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Lake Mendota

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
When I was asked to choose a topic for a scientific article presentation for my Aquatic Ecology class, I decided to research invasive species, and to that end, the article that I found related to the spiny water flea invasion of lakes in Wisconsin's Dane County beginning in 2009. The two lakes that received the bulk of the authors' attention were Lakes Monona and Mendota, of which the Wikipedia article for Lake Mendota was lengthier and more content-filled than that for Lake Monona, which compelled me to evaluate the former. As I live in Waukesha County, which is in the vicinity of Dane County, and as I have gone boating and fishing on Pewaukee Lake in prior summers as part of Make-A-Wish activities, I have a personal attachment to the lake and to its value to society, which the UW-Madison Center for Limnology seems to echo, for its website claims that Lake Mendota is the most-studied lake in the entire United States. The article itself seems to be well-written, although links and references to scientific sources are lacking. The lead section clearly lays out the geography of the lake but makes no mention of its ecological or social significance, though the Geography section is very expansive and fulfills the aforementioned roles that the lead section does not. However, the information about social and academic use of the lake would perhaps be better used with the section on Beaches (with an appropriate retitling), as there is only one sentence in the Beaches section of the article, though it is at least cited. The Lake Study section has numerous grammatical errors when listing physical characteristics of the lake, many of which are already contained within the very detailed and straightforward info-box on the right hand side of the article, but there is reference to the invasive spiny water flea, which was the subject of my journal article. The images are very pleasant to the eye and capture the physical beauty of the lake, though I would personally have liked to see more images of the flora and fauna of the lake.

Evaluate the article
I now shall expand on some of the points that I made in the previous paragraph regarding the article's form and content. The lead section of the article is only two sentences long, the first comparing Lake Mendota to the other three lakes near Madison, Wisconsin, and the second giving a physical description of where Lake Mendota is in relation to nearby neighborhoods. These two sentences pertain solely to the geography of Lake Mendota and do not address concepts such as its bathymetry or physical characteristics (contained in the right-hand side info-box), its professional and recreational use by humans (contained in the Geography and Beaches sections), or the recent introduction of the invasive spiny water flea (contained within the Lake study section). The article's content is very fleshed out when it comes to describing the geography and physical characteristics of the lake, as those sections are well-sourced and are presented in what I would consider to be an appropriate visual form for an article about a lake; on the other hand, there is content about social and academic uses of Lake Mendota found within the Geography section that would be better combined with a very lackluster section on Beaches, which is a mere one sentence long, not to mention the inappropriate capitalization and punctuation of the names of lake characteristics in the Lake study section that are already contained within the info-box, making that content both unprofessionally edited and redundant. All of the sources used seem to date back to around 2009, when I presume is when the article underwent a period of rapid editing, as can also be evidenced from the Talk Page, whose posts mainly relate to images used in the article and all date back to late 2008 and early 2009, so some of the content in the article may well be outdated. As this is an article about a lake in Wisconsin, I see nothing to suggest that the tone of the article is biased towards one particular viewpoint, although there is one claim related to the winter uses of Lake Mendota that is marked with a 'citation needed' tag, though I too do not believe that such information is inconsistent with the manner of presentation in the rest of the article. In consideration of the sources used in the article, all but two of the eight sources contain both the title of the source as well as the publisher and date of access, but none of the sources are scholarly articles. While I can understand this absence with regards to information about geography or bathymetry, I am disappointed that there was not more information provided about the invasive spiny water flea, as there are several scientific papers (including the one that I found) that would be really useful in explaining the biological impact that said invasive species has had on the lake's organismal communities; a source for the numerical aspects of the physical nature of the lake would also have been nice. All of the links that I tested are live, although some of them that did not link to news articles took me to the homepage of the respective organization instead of to the specific page on their websites that contained information about Lake Mendota. With regards to organization, I have voiced my concerns about the article's length and section balance in prior sentences. The map of Wisconsin with a dot marking the location of Lake Mendota is simple and clear to understand, and the rest of the images are very scenic and paint a vivid picture of the quality of the lake and, with regards to the images featuring boats and piers, snapshots of its human relevance. However, I would have desired to see more images containing the lake with the Madison skyline in the background to illustrate its prominence for said city, and there are no images of any aquatic plants or animals inhabiting the lake that would have shed light on the biological communities present therein, which makes the lake seem more eutrophic and dead that it actually is. While I have already made mention of the information discussed on the Talk Page, I should additionally note that the article for Lake Mendota belongs to WikiProject Lakes, WikiProject Wisconsin, and WikiProject Limnology and Oceanography, and is rated as 'Start-Class, Low-importance' for all three. In the end, the article for Lake Mendota has a solid foundation. It is decently sourced and has expressive images, and the lake info-box with its physical characteristics should be a model for other Wisconsin lakes, yet the article's lead section is too short and narrow-focused to be adequate, several of the recreational and collegiate uses of the lake should be reshuffled and combined with the information on beaches, and the Lake study section contains grammatical and repetition errors and is not up-to-date with the latest scholarly information on the invasive spiny water flea.