User:Allisonk444/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I am evaluating the Virology Wikipedia article.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate the virology article because I am interested in how such small scale things can have a large impact on all of humanity. In addition, I find viruses interesting because they are not considered a unit of life, yet they can still replicate and mutate. I do not know of any other thing in our universe that behaves in such a way. Having a good understanding of what viruses are and how they're created is going to be essential for the public in coming years. Viruses are going to become more prevalent and detrimental as many diseases are going to mutate and pass the barriers (such as vaccines) that have kept humanity safe for so long. As we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic; there was large scale panic and misinformation spread about the nature of the virus and to best treat it. To help mediate this the public needs an easily accessible, neutral, and elementary level source (Wikipedia) to aid them in understanding our inevitable future with viruses and how scientist approach studying them. Just from scrolling/glancing through the virology article it appears to be covered well however, I worry it may not be easily understood by someone who is not involved in science.

Evaluate the article
The Virology article was useful in providing a broad overview of the discipline and the various ways it has advanced throughout history. I also appreciated how it brought in examples from the COVID-19 pandemic as this would be relevant an engaging for most if not all readers. Nonetheless there are a few things I would recommend to improve the article:


 * The lead has an easy to understand and broad introduction section stating the beginning of the what, why, and how. However, it does not emphasize the various topics that were discussed later on in the article. The history of virology was overly described in the introduction. In addition it did not place emphasis on the classification of viruses when that was heavily discussed later in the article. Overall the lead appears to be disconnected from the later parts of the article; it may have been written before these additions were made but, it should be updated to include these changes.
 * The content of the article was mostly on topic and useful to the specific topic of Virology. The inclusion of methods and the history of Virology was important. At first I was hesitant about the inclusion of genetics in this article but the editor did a good job of stating its relevance to the actual study of viruses. However, I feel the Baltimore Classification section does not belong here. It is not directly related towards virology and it would make more sense to be a link to a separate page; perhaps one that is just talking about viruses as opposed to this article that is talking about the study of viruses. There should be section detected to the explanation of virology and structure. It was mentioned in the lead and briefly in the history section but was not expanded upon like the other topics.
 * For the history section I noticed all the scientist mentioned were from Europe/America. I find it hard to believe Europe/America were the only places working on virology and more work should be done to share the work of traditionally underrepresented groups and their involvement in the field of virology.
 * The history section of the article I found to be difficult to follow. The use of transition words and sentences to help bridge the works of scientist would do well in improving the flow of the section and therefore the understanding of the audience.
 * The article does a good job at keeping a neutral tone.
 * The citations on the article are mostly within the past one-two decades; the oldest ones being related to the history of virology which is relevant. However some citations, specifically in the methods section are from the 1980's-2000's and this being a scientific and medical field there have been significant changes since then. This indicates that the information in the article as well as the sources need to be updated.
 * The images included in the article are helpful however, I wish the editors would have included better captions to indicate which subsection each image was belonging to and how it related to the content being discussed. In addition I think some images could have been included under the genetics section to aid in understanding.
 * On the talk-page they discuss that the virology article should be merged with the virus article. I agree with this because it would be easy to include how viruses came to be studied in said article and the information wouldn't be repeated across multiple sources too many times. The article has a B rating and is part of the Viruses wiki project.

Overall I found the article to be very informative specifically about the various methods used in Virology to detect, replicate, and study these diseases. I think more work could be put into the history section specifically talking about more diverse groups of scientists and with making the content flow in a better manner.