User:AmidstClouds/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Groundwater on Mars

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because of my interest in the planet Mars, and the article was listed as a C-class Mars article. Since one of the primary questions in regards to the history of Mars is how much water there was, what form the water was in, and how long the water was there for, the topic of groundwater is an important piece of this puzzle.

Evaluate the article
Overall this article lacked cohesiveness between topics, completeness, and citations. The end of the overview introduced a few different topics without going into very much detail in the following sections. The article also lacked completeness in its discussion of the topic. For example, evidence for groundwater sapping on Mars was not discussed. There were also many claims being made without a citation to back it up, some examples are listed below.

Here are concerns specific to certain sections:


 * The end of the Overview had some standalone sentences that needed more context.


 * Another form of inverted terrain that wasn't mentioned in the "Inverted terrain" section is eskers.
 * "Pedestal craters" section contains no text, only figures with captions.

Examples of statements missing citations to back up the claims:


 * "the water passed through  igneous rock basalt, which would have contained sulfur."
 * "In an aquifer, water occupies open space (pore space) that lies between rock particles. This layer would spread out, eventually coming to be under most of the Martian surface."
 * "Calculations and simulations show that groundwater carrying dissolved minerals would surface in the same locations that have abundant rock layers."
 * "Martian ground water probably moved hundreds of kilometers, and in the process it dissolved many minerals from the rock it passed through."
 * "Orbiting probes showed that the type of rock around Opportunity was present in a very large area that included Arabia, which is about as large as Europe."