User:Andrew.Jacobs/sandbox

I am practicing being Bold.

Article Evaluation
I picked the "History of materials science" as my article to evaluate.

Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you? The section titled "Antiquity" didn't have complete sentences, and brought up random time periods without citing the actual time periods or following any logical flow between them. The "Modern materials science" section talks about a past Penn State professor and a society from Penn State. Although it may be important to the history of materials science, it seems a little biased to not cover any other schools, programs, or professors, and it was distracting to the topic as a whole.

Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? The article doesn't have any persuasion, although Penn State and Northwestern are the only institutions to receive coverage in the article, even though there are many more schools, programs and faculty that were instrumental to the history of materials science.

Are there viewpoints that are over-represented, or underrepresented? Penn state is way over-represented, many more institutions could be covered. There is also under-representation of material development, and very sparse coverage of material breakthroughs (missing details on steel production, aluminum production, developments in aerospace, ancient metallurgical processes, how the development of ceramics allowed civilizations to spread due to water storage techniques, etc.)

Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article? Links work, but the citation to Northwestern's Materials Science department is only labelled as a [1] in the references section. Also, that specific reference has different information than the article (Article says first material science department was made in 1955, reference says 1958.)

Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted? There are a lot of references missing pretty much all over the article. The whole thing needs to be fact checked, and more content/references are needed.

Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added? There's just a lot of general content that could be added on the subject.

Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic? Not much talk, but it's pretty good.

How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects? It is start class, high importance for history/physics, mid importance for history of science, and it is just a part of technology.

How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class? Not really, it's just missing information we talked about in class.

Why did we choose this article?
This article is a start article in a field both Nick and I care a lot about. The current article has very limited information on the development of ancient materials, and the modern section is filled with information about the development of the field at Penn State, which could be expanded. We will focus more on creating a timeline in the article, adding one development and how it contributed to the development of society or how it led to the next development in the field. In the modern section, we will focus on the development of material science and engineering at universities and how the science has contributed to the development of modern technology as a whole. Andrew.Jacobs (talk) 17:50, 2 March 2018 (UTC) Njanrd (talk) 17:54, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Stone Age
The use of materials begins in the stone age. Typically materials such as bone, fibers, feathers, shells, animal skin, and clay were used for weapons, tools, jewelry, and shelter. The earliest tools were in the paleolithic age where simple tools called Oldowan. These were tools created from chipped rocks that would be used for scavenging purpose. As history carried on into the Mesolithic age, tools became more complex and symmetrical in design with sharper edges. Moving into the Neolithic age, agriculture began to develop as new was to form tools for farming were discovered. Nearing the end of the stone age, humans began using copper, gold, and silver as a material. Due to these metals softness, the general use was for ceremonial purposes and to create ornaments or decorations and did not replace other materials for use in tools. The simplicity of the tools used reflected on the simple understanding of the human species of the time. <ref name="Book" ~

Bronze age
The use of copper had become very apparent to civilizations, such as its properties of elasticity and plasticity that allow it to be hammered into useful shapes, along with its ability to be melted and pored into intricate shapes. Although the advantages of copper were many, the materials was to soft to find large scale usefulness. Through experimentation or by chance, additions to copper lead to increased hardness of a new metal alloy, called bronze. Bronze was originally composed of copper and arsenic, forming arsenic bronze.

Intro to Materials Science (Draft)
Materials science has shaped the development of civilizations since the dawn of mankind. Better materials for tools and weapons has allowed mankind to spread and conquer, and advancements in material processing like steel and aluminum production continue to impact society today. Historians have regarded materials as such an important aspect of civilizations such that entire periods of time have defined by the predominant material used (stone age, bronze age, iron age, etc.). For most of recorded history, control of materials had been through alchemy or empirical means at best. The study and development of chemistry and physics assisted the study of materials, and eventually the interdisciplinary study of materials science emerged from the fusion of these studies. Andrew.Jacobs (talk) 03:35, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Notable Discoveries of the 19th Century
Before the early 1800s, aluminum had not been produced as an isolated metal. It wasn't until 1825 that Hans Christian Ørsted discovered how to create elemental aluminum via the reduction of aluminum chloride. Since aluminum is a light element with good mechanical properties, it was widely sought to replace heavier less functional metals like silver and gold. Napoleon III used aluminum plates and utensils for his honored guests, while the rest were given silver. However, this process was still expensive and was still not able to produce the metal in large quantities. In 1886, American Charles Martin Hall and Frenchman Paul Héroult invented a process completely independent of each other to produce aluminum from aluminum oxide via electrolysis. This process would allow aluminum to be manufactured cheaper than ever before, and laid the groundwork for turning the element from a precious metal into an easily obtainable commodity. Around the same time in 1888, Carl Josef Bayer was working in St Petersburg, Russia to develop a method to make pure alumina for the textile industry. This process involved dissolving the aluminum oxide out of the bauxite mineral to produce gibbsite, which can then be purified back into raw alumina. The Bayer process and the Hall-Héroult process are still used today to produce a majority of the world's alumina and aluminum. Andrew.Jacobs (talk) 05:48, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Material Science as a Field of Study(Draft: New Section)
Most fields of studies have a founding father, such as Newton in physics and Lavoisier in chemistry. Materials science on the other hand has no central figure that set in motion materials studies. In the 1940's, wartime collaborations of multiple fields of study to produce technological advances became a structure to the future field of study that would become known as material science and engineering. During the Cold War in the 1950's, US President Science Advisory Committee (PSCAS) made materials a priority when it realized that materials were the limiting factor for advances in space and military technology. The Department of defense signed a contract with 5 universities (Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, and Chicago) providing over $13 million for material research. Several institutions departments changed titles from "metallurgy" to "metallurgy and materials science" in 1960's. Njanrd (talk) 03:17, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Peer Review by Mwa459 (talk) 18:50, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
The expansion of the introduction heading on this Wikipedia page is a good idea as the current introduction is lacking. It might be a good idea to add a descriptive sentence after the first sentence explaining how materials development shape civilizations (i.e. better weaponry, tools etc.). The concluding sentence in the introduction ties everything together well.

I am not sure if you were planning on adding the heading "Stone Age" as a subheading to the prehistory heading as listed here on the talk page. I liked the clear descriptions used of what materials were used and their purposes in the stone age section. Also, would you add the bronze and iron ages as subheadings too? The addition of the section "Material Science as a Field of Study" seems like a good way to identify where the study of materials became a distinctive scientific specialty.

The fourth reference might not match the Wikipedia rules for references. It might be a good idea to check with the professor regarding this.

I like how you plan to create a timeline in your article and feel like this is a technique that I could use in my article too.

I like the idea to add new sections that can provide more descriptive information. The writing that you have appears to be well written and balanced. However, most importantly, there is a need to add more information to substantiate these headings to enable them to provide a more complete picture and better support the topic of the article. It might also be a good idea to explain the different fields of study (metals, ceramics, polymers) that exist in modern materials science. Mwa459 (talk) 01:06, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Peer Review by CLMnator (talk) 17:30, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
The introduction changes are really good. Your intro does a good job of explaining what the article covers.

The stone age heading has good info and fits well in the Prehistory section of the article.

A timeline is a good change for this article. I probably should update the timeline in my article.

You mentioned adding more info for the modern section and that sound like a positive change for this article. I don't see anything in your drafts about this, specifically how it affected modern science. If you could add it, it would do a lot for the article. What you have up will help this article quite a bit.

Response to Peer Review
Thanks for what was said, we will definitely continue to expand our sections in the coming weeks. We will focus on the materials of each "age" like stone and bronze and such, and we will expand on modern material science in two different ways. The first is that we will explore the development of the field as is being done right now, but we will also definitely focus on general developments in ceramics, metallurgy and polymers as well.

I will remove the fourth source because the link appears to have expired anyway... We'll find a replacement.

I added a little blurb about how new tools and weapons allowed civilizations to spread and how even what we would consider "old" developments like steel and aluminum production are still impacting our lives today. I will add stuff to the intro as it comes to me, but for right now I think it's brief and effective. Andrew.Jacobs (talk) 03:42, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

List of Sources
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Materials_Science_and_Engineering/Timeline_of_Material_Advances