User:Allyhoward/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I am evaluating the Methanopyrus article.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article to evaluate because Methanopyrus is a genus of marine microorganism which is relevant to the course. It is a microorganism of some note because it can resist extremely high temperatures. My preliminary impression was that there was not much information available about Methanopyrus. A lot of the information on the Wikipedia article is repeated in a few of the sections.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Despite having relatively little content overall, the lead section of this article provides a good overview of the topic. The first sentence gives just enough information to determine the topic of the page. The lead section outlines the majority of the rest of the article, but it could mention some of the future research that could be done with Methanopyrus as there is an entire section on this topic later in the article. The lead does not contain any unnecessary information making it concise and easy to read.

The content of this article is well balanced and seems to cover the majority of what is known on the topic. Although there is little information in the Wikipedia article, this is likely due to there being little information on the topic available anywhere. The majority of the references are from the early 2000s but in doing a quick literature search I was unable to find any more recent articles, or any information that was not already covered in the article.

Overall, the tone of the article is neutral and balanced. There are not many viewpoints represented because it is a topic that is relatively straightforward. One thing to note is that in the future research section the article makes an unreferenced claim about the utility of topoisomerase V and the difficulty in finding this enzyme elsewhere. This statement could be further elaborated or referenced.

All the facts in this article are referenced and all the references are reliable sources, primarily scientific articles. There is not much diversity in the authorship of these articles, but there is also not much research overall into this topic. From my own literature search, I did not find any articles that would be better suited to support this article. The links to the current references work and are up to date.

The article is well written and clear to read. There are no grammatical errors and despite jargon the flow is clear. The meaning of the jargon is linked to other Wikipedia articles for clarification which helps a non-expert make their way through the information. The different sections have clear titles for ease of use and finding the information that you want quickly.

One major downside of this article is the lack of images. An SEM image of the archea in question would be highly beneficial for visualizing the organism. Additionally, an image of the habitats in which they existed could provide a good picture of what these organisms experience.

There are not many conversations happening on the Talk page of this article. It seems as though the article is likely rarely frequented. The article is part of two WikiPorjects: the Microbiology project and the Marine Life project. In both cases, it is rated as a C-class article, needing further information and clean-up.

Overall, this is a C-class article meaning it has a good coverage of the topic but could still use some cleaning and additional work. The strengths of this article are that it is concise and clear to read. There is no confusing or irrelevant language used. On the other hand, the article would benefit from some imagery and a deeper dive into the available literature. I would consider this article to be under-developed, but it has really good potential to become a solid article for reference in microbiology and oceanography.